Here is a quiet way that businesses get stuck. A vendor sets up the phone line, the accounts and the automations in the vendor's own name, because it is faster. It works for a year. Then the business wants to change vendor, or the vendor disappears, and the phone number that is printed on the vans belongs to someone else.
The fix is not clever. It is to do it the slow way from the start.
In your name
The phone number is bought in the business's account. The accounts with the model providers, the messaging provider and the connectors are the business's accounts, with the vendor given access, not the other way round. The records live in the business's own CRM, calendar and books, where they would live anyway. The workflows are written down in a runbook that a competent person could follow.
It takes a few more hours in the first week. It is worth every one of them.
What stopping looks like
If a business stops working with us, it keeps all of it. We remove our own access and leave the runbook. The phone keeps ringing and the system keeps answering until someone decides otherwise. There is no export to request and no migration to plan, because nothing was ever anywhere else.
The usage bills
One honest complication. When the accounts are in your name, the usage bills from the providers arrive in your name too. That has to be arranged openly, and we would rather talk about it on the first call than have it turn up as a surprise.
The question to ask
To any vendor, including us: "If we stop in six months, what do we keep, and what do we have to rebuild?" A good answer is short. A long answer is the answer.
This is one of the terms we put in writing before starting. The rest are on the Approach page.